"Gordon R. Dickson - The Forever Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"Jim," said the general, deep-voiced, his round, snubnosed, pugnacious face unsmiling. "I want you to
meet Dr. Mary Gallegher. She's from the Geriatrics Bureau."
She would be, thought Jim sourly, reaching out to shake hands with her. Mary Gallegher was almost as
tall as Jim himself, who at five feet ten was near the upper limit in height for the cramped quarters of the
pilot's com seat of a fighter ship, and her handshake was not weak. But still . . . here she was, thought
Jim, still resenting her for being someone as young as Jim himself, full of the juices of living, and with
all her attention focused on the gray and tottering endyears of life. A bodysnatcher-a snatcher of old
bodies from the brink of the grave for a few months or a few years.
"Pleased to meet you, Mary," he said.
"Good to meet you, Jim."
"Sit down," said the general. Jim pulled up a chair and they all sat down once more around the desk.
"What's up, sir?" asked Jim. "They told me it was a gmeral callout."
"The call-out's a fake. Just an excuse to put extra ships on the Frontier for something special," answered
Mollen. "The something special's why Mary's here. And you. What do you remember about the Sixty
Ships Battle?"

THE FOREVER MAN / 5
"It was right after we found we had a frontier in common with the Laagi, wasn't it?" said Jim, slightly
puzzled. "Over one hundred years ago or so. Back before we found out logistics made mass spaceship
battles unworkable. Sixty of ours met forty-some of theirs beyond the Frontier, as it is now, and theirs
were better. What about it?"
"Do you remember how the battle came out?" It was the civilian, Mary Gallegher, leaning forward with
an intensity that puzzled him.
Jim shrugged.
"They were better, as I say. Our ships were slower then. We hadn't started to design them for guarding a
frontier, instead of fighting pitched battles. They cut us up and suckered what was left into staying
clumped together while they set off a nova explosion," he said. He looked into her eyes and spoke
deliberately. "The ships on the edge of the explosion were burned up like paper cutouts. The ones in the
center just disappeared."
"Disappeared," said Mary Gallegher. She did not seem disturbed by Jim's description of the explosion.
"That's the right word. How long ago did you say this was?"
"Over a hundred years ago," said Jim. He turned and looked at General Mollen, with a glance that said
plainlyWhat is this, sir?
"Look here, Jim," said the general. "We've got something to show you."
He pushed aside the few papers on the surface of the table in front of him and touched some studs on the
control console near the edge of the top. The overhead lights dimmed. The surface of the table became
transparent and gave way to a scene of stars. To the three seated around the desk top it was as if they
looked down and out into an area of space a thousand light-years across. To the civilian, Jim was
thinking, the stars would be only a maze. To Jim himself, the image was long familiar.
Mollen's hands did things with the studs. Two hazy spheres of dim light, each about a hundred and fifty
lightyears in diameter along its longest axis, sprang into viewbright enough to establish their position

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and volume, not so bright as to hide the stars they enclosed. The center of one of

6 / Gordon R. Dickson
the spheres was the surf of Earth, and the farthest extent of this sphere in one direction intermixed with
an edge of the other.